UCxn: Typologically Informed Annotation of Constructions Atop Universal Dependencies

Leonie Weissweiler, Nina Böbel, Kirian Guiller, Santiago Herrera, Wesley Scivetti, Arthur Lorenzi, Nurit Melnik, Archna Bhatia, Hinrich Schütze, Lori Levin, Amir Zeldes, Joakim Nivre, William Croft, Nathan Schneider

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has created an invaluable collection of treebanks with contributions in over 140 languages. However, the UD annotations do not tell the full story. Grammatical constructions that convey meaning through a particular combination of several morphosyntactic elements-for example, interrogative sentences with special markers and/or word orders-are not labeled holistically. We argue for (i) augmenting UD annotations with a “UCxn” annotation layer for such meaning-bearing grammatical constructions, and (ii) approaching this in a typologically informed way so that morphosyntactic strategies can be compared across languages. As a case study, we consider five construction families in ten languages, identifying instances of each construction in UD treebanks through the use of morphosyntactic patterns. In addition to findings regarding these particular constructions, our study yields important insights on methodology for describing and identifying constructions in language-general and language-particular ways, and lays the foundation for future constructional enrichment of UD treebanks.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages16919-16932
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9782493814104
StatePublished - 2024
EventJoint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Hybrid, Torino, Italy
Duration: 20 May 202425 May 2024

Publication series

Name2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Main Conference Proceedings

Conference

ConferenceJoint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityHybrid, Torino
Period20/05/2425/05/24

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 ELRA Language Resource Association: CC BY-NC 4.0.

Keywords

  • corpus annotation
  • grammatical constructions
  • treebanks
  • typology
  • Universal Dependencies

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